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MidwestRoots.Net

MidwestRoots.net
Professional Genealogy Services for the Midwest, by Harold Henderson, CG (SM).

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Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Not all Midwesterners were born here! Distant cousin Skip Higgins reminded me to visit the unusually named Old Fulton NY Post Cards, a quirky website much expanded since my last visit. For our purposes its most interesting feature its enormous collection of every-word-searchable images of old New York state newspapers. It's free, and I know from my own research that it gets results not found on Genealogy Bank, NewspaperArchive, 19th Century US Newspapers, or America's Historic Newspapers.

It's not always easy to get the information needed to properly cite the search results you find but it is possible. The trick is to use the FAQ-HELP-INDEX button in the far upper right of the home screen, click on the list of newspaper titles, find the title you want in the three-page non-alphabetical list, and look through the individual page PDFs. This same button will lead you to an address for sending donations.

It appears to me that some papers have the sides or bottoms of the pages cut off in scanning. But for quick access to more than 200 upstate New York newspaper titles, I'll take it.

2 comments:

Tom Tryniski is amazing. His Old Fulton Post Cards site started out as just that, he scanned his collection and put it online. At some point he got a scanner that digitizes old microfilm and I believe that is why some pages are cut off. Tom does this all from his home, by himself. He has at least 6 million pages online. The newspapers are a gold mine for anyone researching in upstate NY.

The site sometimes gets bogged down so try to visit at off peak times if you can.

Besides the newspapers and photos there are some other hidden gems. If you click on the bar on the bottom of the right hand side of the page, "View Fulton Historical Photos" you will get an index of sorts. You can also access the newspaper "index" from here. He also has some NY census records scanned as well as cemetery records from both Fulton and Syracuse. There are also Oswego County probate records from the 1800's with some land transactions thrown in.